Open Source Bridge -- Day One

Jun 17, 2009

Amber Case on our gradual transition into cyborgs. Very funny talk. I
wouldn’t normally think of myself or any of my fellow human beings as
cyborgs, but when you stop to think about the gadgetry that we keep on
our persons at just about all times nowadays…

Kurt von Finck and the “hacker business model”. What if, instead of
specifically asking employees to put in 7.5 hours a day, you asked them
to put in 75 hours every two weeks? It’s an interesting idea. While many
programmers do their best work with fixed-width, evenly-spaced work
shifts, others thrive on binge coding. Perpetual binging is
unmaintainable, but with nice, long breaks between sprints, it can be
quite productive.

J. Chris Anderson presented Deploying to the Edge from
CouchDB. A good overview of
CouchDB which seems to get more and more
attention these days. CouchDB is not a traditional relational database
but rather a document-based database. It’s written in
Erlang and communication is based on HTTP and
JSON. Among its most appealing features is its capacity for distributed
and even embedded operation. It has enticing potential for offline
applications.

Scott Becker spoke about Agile Javscript
Testing. Informative
presentation on a topic on which I really need to get up to speed. He
demonstrated
Screw.Unit, a BDD
framework inspired by RSpec. He also demonstrated
Blue Ridge, a
Rails plugin which combines several Javascript-testing tools (including
Screw.Unit) and paves the way for integrating Javascript tests into the
rest of the test suite for Rails applications.

There were some promising sessions in the afternoon schedule, but,
tragically work beckoned and I spent the better part of the afternoon on
the computer.